Thinking about, shouting at each other about, thinking some more about, shouting some more just in case one wasn’t understood during the first round of shouting, threatening in case the shouting wasn’t intimidating enough and then mostly waiting for someone else to try it first.Uitgevers leren niet uit de fouten van de muziekindustrie.

Nielsen reports that Internet users worldwide now spend 5.35 hours a month on social networks, up from just three hours a year ago. The social web is the new home page; remember how news sites all put up “make us your home page” buttons just a decade ago. News sites, of course, are lucky to break into double digits — 10 minutes — per month in usage.

(…)

That old newsprint-based serendipity we bemoaned was being lost in the move to web searching and browsing is being reborn. (…) Among this vast infinity of story reading choice, we’re using our friends and colleagues as filters, though the process is still ungainly.

I don’t read printed newspapers. (…) I generally read at least a couple dozen articles daily though, mostly pointed out by my social circle (people who blog that I follow, twitter users I trust, friends sharing things in Google Reader). Friends are an amazing social filter and the social filter is essentially replicating the water cooler online.

“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

De Titanic-denkfout

“The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

1. We decided early on that the Texas Tribune needed room to evolve. It’s a startup, and nobody has any idea what it’s going to look like in six months. That being the case, our goal was to build them a sandbox — something that could evolve as their organization evolved. (…) We’re not limited by pre-existing modules or dependency issues you find with off-the-shelf systems.

2. The Tribune’s plan going forward is to integrate tremendous amounts of data into their coverage. Their lawmaker directory is one example of that, but they have much more ambitious plans for campaign finance records, financial disclosures, lobbying reports, etc. Rather than segregating that data by walling it off in its own ghetto.

“The idea that you can do ‘more with less‘ is, in my view, one of the four great lies,” Keller told his staff. “What you can do with less, is less. But if you are smart and careful, you can limit the harm.”

As for the diminishing supply of real, reported news that matters, every week brings another example. Here’s one that’s fresh in my mind. The other day some of us spent half an hour looking at CNN’s redesigned website. It is the second most heavily trafficked online news site. The redesign is cleaner and brighter. Just one thing: It has hardly any news. On Tuesday, when CNN television was treating Election Day with the usual bells and whistles, the home page of CNN.com did not seem to be aware that there was voting going on. The most striking news story on the page had the following headline: “Canadian folk singer killed by coyotes.” (Now, if it had been Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen.…)

Smart division of labor makes writing for the Times easy and quick. My advice for other group blog sites: Hire someone to handle all images for posts, so your writers can focus on writing. Beyond that, a good editor will turn good bloggers into better bloggers by helping them improve weak passages, by teaching writers to fill their posts with context and clarity, and sometimes by shooting down a post that just isn’t working. For all this, your writers will hate them. But readers will love it.